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Chess's Lost Soul, Bobby Fischer, Is Held in Tokyo

After two decades of living in secrecy, semi-isolation and increasingly distressed obscurity, Bobby Fischer, the former world chess champion, was arrested Friday by Japanese immigration authorities in Tokyo and accused of trying to leave the country without a valid passport.

An American Embassy official in Tokyo confirmed that Mr. Fischer was detained at Narita Airport. Japanese news reports said Mr. Fischer, 61, probably would be deported to the United States, where he faces charges for violating economic sanctions against the former Yugoslavia by playing an exhibition match there in 1992. But Mr. Fischer's immediate future remains unclear.

Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said it was not yet determined whether the United States would ask that Mr. Fischer be turned over to the American authorities. He said only that Mr. Fischer, who has expressed virulently anti-American views since the warrant was issued for his arrest on Dec. 15, 1992, had been visited by an American consular officer.

''Questions about extradition or charges would have to be answered by the Department of Justice and the appropriate courts,'' Mr. Boucher said. The Justice Department had no comment, but an official said it was looking at the case to determine its legal options, including possible extradition. The official added that it was too soon to predict how the case might turn out. The detention of Mr. Fischer came the day before another longtime American fugitive -- Charles Jenkins, 64, who is accused of deserting the Army in 1965, when he entered North Korea -- was scheduled to arrive in Japan, and who is also expected to be the subject of an American extradition request.

It was unclear why Mr. Fischer was in Japan, though it is possible he was living there. In a radio interview broadcast from Manila in June 2003, he told the host that he was in Japan at the time. And chess publications that have long been obsessed with tracking the movements of the mysterious former champion have reported that Mr. Fischer travels frequently between Tokyo and Manila.

The episode is just the latest wrinkle in the strange international saga of Mr. Fischer -- indisputably the greatest American chess player in history and some say the greatest ever in the world -- whose life has spiraled weirdly and precipitously downward since his greatest glory.

Born in Chicago but reared in Brooklyn, he first drew attention as an adolescent prodigy, able to hold his own with the strongest American players at the Marshall and Manhattan Chess Clubs in Manhattan. A national champion at 14 and a grandmaster at 15, he became an international celebrity in 1972 when, at the height of the cold war, he unseated the Russian world champion, Boris Spassky, in a match in Reykjavik, Iceland. That, however, was to be the last of Mr. Fischer's triumphs. A petulant, demanding man with a cruel unpredictable streak, by the time he became world champion he was already known for his outlandishly self-aggrandizing behavior. It was part of what made him a legend.

In ''Searching for Bobby Fischer,'' the 1988 book about the chess world that is partly about Mr. Fischer's status as an icon, the author, Fred Waitzkin, summed up Mr. Fischer's behavior in Reykjavik this way: ''He drove the organizers of the tournament to despair. He argued about the choice of chess table, about his hotel room, about the noise in the auditorium, about the proximity of the audience to the players and about the lighting. He demanded that the organizers lend him a Mercedes with an automatic transmission and arrange for the private use of a swimming pool. He came late to each game and kept threatening to pull out of the match if his demands weren't met.''

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It was a harsh eccentricity that soon grew self-destructive. Mr. Fischer's sanity seemed to frazzle in the limelight, and he sank into a contrary isolation that seems to characterize him to this day.

After the Spassky match, he refused offers to play chess for titanic sums of money, and he lost his title after three years because he refused to defend it against Anatoly Karpov of the Soviet Union. His time was evidently consumed by lawsuits, one brought against him by Chester Fox, who had held the film rights to the Spassky match, but which became worthless because Mr. Fischer had refused to play before the cameras, which he said he could hear whirring. Mr. Fischer unsuccessfully sued a biographer, Brad Darrach, and the Time-Life Corporation, for invasion of privacy. Another suit, against a student group that he claimed published, without permission, remarks he made about his affiliation with a fringe church, also failed and reportedly left him bankrupt.

A virulent anti-Semite in spite of his own Jewish ancestry (his mother was a Jew), he has claimed that his belongings were stolen by a Jewish conspiracy from a warehouse in Southern California, where he lived during the 1980's. The federal indictment against him after the match in Yugoslavia seemed to ignite an equally virulent anti-American fire in him. Over the past five years, his occasional rants to radio stations in Iceland and Hungary, as well as the Philippines, have been full of hate against Jews and the United States.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio talk-show host in Baguio, the Philippines, that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were ''wonderful news,'' adding he was wishing for a scenario ''where the country will be taken over by the military, they'll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews and secure hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.''

Mr. Fischer lived for a time in Pasadena, Calif., and it has been reported that from 1975 to 1992, he lived in cheap rooms around Los Angeles. Over the past decade, however, he is known to have lived in Budapest, and reportedly has also lived in the Philippines and Switzerland.

For two decades, Mr. Fischer was a specter that haunted the chess world; its greatest genius had vanished with almost no trace. The few people he kept in touch with were under threat that he would never speak to them again if they discussed him -- which was why it was colossal news in 1992 when he was lured out of hiding for a rematch against Mr. Spassky in Yugoslavia.

Just before the match, however, the United Nations imposed sanctions against Yugoslavia for supporting Serbian aggression in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the United States banned its citizens from doing business there. Mr. Fischer ignored a formal warning from the government against playing the match, and at a news conference spat on the letter. He won the match, collecting $3.3 million, and has been in exile from the United States ever since.

Bruce Weber reported from Washington for this article and Todd Zaun from Tokyo. Dylan McClain contributed reporting from New York.